Holy Week and the Cross of Christ

Reflections about The Cross of Christ

Here is a small collection of moving and provocative quotes and comments about the Cross and Holy Week that I have collected over the years. They are sermon starters, devotional nudges, and deep expressions of our faith and love of Jesus Christ and the Cross He endured. May the Lord richly bless you all in the Holy Week.

I am praying with and for all those who have the burden and joy of pastoral leadership and preaching. –DHR

Notes and Quotes about The Cross

We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.
― Peter Kreeft

Golgotha, the place of the skull, where nails smashed through the wrists and feet of Jesus, the teacher from Nazareth in Galilee, can stand for the skulls of every genocide. Betrayal by friends, self-preserving denial, making sport with prisoners, the mockery of crowds, spectators drawn to the spectacle, the soldiers doing their duty and dicing for his clothes, a mother in agony, and a knot of women helplessly looking on—it happens time, and time, and time again.
—Richard John Neuhaus

Is it not wonderful news to believe that salvation lies outside ourselves.
— Martin LutherBefore we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us.”
― John R.W. Stott

It cost God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.
—C.S. Lewis

In the Cross is salvation; in the Cross is life; in the Cross is protection against our enemies; in the Cross is infusion of heavenly sweetness; in the Cross is strength of mind; in the Cross is joy of spirit; in the Cross is excellence of virtue; in the Cross is perfection of holiness. There is no salvation of soul, nor hope of eternal life, save in the Cross.
― Thomas à Kempis

No scene in sacred history ever gladdens the soul like the scene on Calvary. Nowhere does the soul find such consolation as on that very spot where misery reigned, where woe triumphed, here agony reached its climax.
—C. H. Spurgeon

We may say that on the first Good Friday afternoon was completed that great act by which light conquered darkness and goodness conquered sin. That is the wonder of our Saviour’s crucifixion. There have been victories all over the world, but wherever we look for the victor we expect to find him with his heel upon the neck of the vanquished. The wonder of Good Friday is that the victor lies vanquished by the vanquished one. We have to look deeper into the very heart and essence of things before we can see how real the victory is that thus hides itself under the guise of defeat.
—Phillips Brooks

All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself.
—G.K. Chesterton

Good Friday

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
― W.H. Auden

The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, substantial flesh and blood–Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
― T.S. Eliot

All of heaven is interested in the cross of Christ, hell afraid of it, while men are the only ones to ignore its meaning.
– Oswald Chambers

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